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Monday, January 2, 2012

Mappy Monday: Connecticut "Unique Place Names"

Connecticut has a tendency to name parts of towns as though they were municipalities. This can cause problems for non-locals who, naturally, believe that they're looking at a reference for an actual town. It's only when they search for a town clerk's office that they discover they have a problem. If you've ever tried to locate the records for an ancestor living in Tylerville (Haddam), you know what I mean. This morning's search to place a village in the proper town finally motivated me to find a resource that could do it for me. As luck would have it, such a thing does actually exist! The Connecticut State Library has something they call the "Unique Connecticut Place Names" list. It can be found at http://www.cslib.org/placenames.htm. This list, which can be sorted alphabetically by either village name or town name, lists the village name followed by the town. It's a huge time saver. I'm still searching for a version of this list that links to map images...

It very well may have been! I've been reading some interesting commentary from a book called "Post Roads & Iron Horses" about how the villages with a name and -ville were often called after the owner of a factory.